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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Denmark diary - day 1

We flew out
of Toronto around 9 pm on Monday night, only slightly behind schedule. We both
slept for maybe half of the seven and a half hour flight; the rest passed by
easily. Copenhagen at 11 am might have been the easiest semi-major airport we’ve
ever flown into – we were at and then through immigration control in a few minutes
(no line up and no silly information card) and the bags arrived a few minutes
after that. And the centre of the city was only a ten-minute cab ride away. If
things were always this easy, life wouldn’t seem serious.

We’re
staying in the Scandic Front hotel, right on the Inderhavnen river, which on
the map holds up the main slab of the city; in terms of the guide book
partitions , we’re in North Copenhagen. The hotel is part of a Scandinavian chain
and shows a few signs of aging – I’m surprised there’s anyone still alive who
remembers how to service the elevator – but otherwise it’s all good: the
wireless Internet worked easily, the bed is comfortable (for me that’s the
right order of priority), there’s a Nespresso machine, and so on. It would have a good view
of the water and surrounding events, but that’s hampered a bit by scaffolding
outside the window. Anyway, none of this is a problem, and the location is
terrific. We took a few minutes and then went right out and started walking,
around noon.

We started
going north along the river, following the natural visual pull of where we were.
The initial impression reminded us of somewhere like Bermuda’s dockyards, with
the feel of a reclaimed industrial heritage, although I expect the difference here
is that it never had to be reclaimed because it was never lost; the harbor is
filled with ships, both functional and decorative; the stone landscape is immaculate, mostly long-established but with various grandly isolated new
buildings visible on the other side of the water as we walked along, as if from
the legacy of a past Olympics (that’s a topical reference). Before long this
opened out into an initially rather confusing deep-green pattern of circling
trails and water, which eventually resolved itself into the Kastellet, the
former site of a 1600’s fort surrounded by a moat, now seemingly a prime
location for joggers. But before that, just through beginners' luck, we
ticked off what’s apparently the city’s prime tourist attraction, the statue of
the Little Mermaid, on the rocks watching the water. It’s a beguiling sight,
because it’s unusual to see a statue in such an informal location, but
obviously, as aesthetic wonders go, you’d have to limit your scoring.

We walked around
the Kastellet, and then wandered away from the water, through streets which
evoked some parts of Paris - the elegant parts located away from the action, on a very slow day (we often wish we were more attuned to architecture, and better able to detect something of a city’s history from the contrasts between one block and the next).
We passed a lot of art galleries and a lot of restaurants – no sign that anyone
living in this part of town needs anything more than that. The streets were largely deserted until we were close to
the hotel again, and then suddenly we came round a corner and there were
hundreds of people eating and drinking and hanging out. There are versions of
this in every city, like the tourist equivalent of the drug dealers who never leave the block where they do business.
We’d found the Nyhavn, a canal crammed with boats and atmosphere, where it
seems every building on the north side is a bar or a restaurant (and where I
guess the owners have coordinated their paint jobs to present a relative colour
explosion – Stockholm was like this throughout, but what we’d seen of
Copenhagen so far had been muted by comparison), and I guess we had it at the
peak of a summer lunchtime. The south side of the Nyhavn has some restaurants
too, but it doesn’t look like anyone eats there.

We
continued walking south, towards the square on our map containing the word “CITY”
in red upper case letters, past the Magasin du Nord, a huge department store of
the kind most notable these days for being in financial trouble, and then we
stopped for lunch on a little side street, at an elegant place called Café Zeze.
We had a glass of wine, Ally had a chicken salad sandwich and I had a smoked
salmon sandwich – it was very good, and cost around $60. Finance-wise, it’ll
just get worse from there, but we always knew this wasn’t a budget destination
(or at least, we knew that if there’s a way of doing it on a budget, we wouldn’t worry
about trying to find it).

It was a
warm day, but several degrees below what we’ve had in Toronto recently, so very
comfortable. We walked a little further, finding the Danish cinematheque (screeing a Nicholas Ray season, among other things), and
then getting drawn into the large park that surrounds the Rosenborg Slot, a
royal palace containing the Danish crown jewels. The park was surprisingly full
of young people, as if they were waiting for a concert or something, although
there was no sign of one – I guess we’re not used to seeing people simply
enjoying their parks in such numbers (random observation – the Danes definitely seem to
smoke more than the Swedes, and to engage in more open air drinking). We passed through the palace without going inside it,
and walked back into the city, surely finding the shopping heart of it now – more brand
names and quite a crush of people at various points. That was just about enough
for an initial expedition, so we walked back to the hotel by following the
water, passing through the Nyhavn again and getting back around three thirty.

We were
both asleep within minutes, although I did of course check the webcam at Urban
Dog where Ozu is staying. He was lying in his favourite spot, on the platform in
the middle of the room, conserving energy while almost all the other dogs run
around trying to use it up. We went out again around seven thirty. By then the
area was a bit noisier – there’s some kind of festival going on nearby with a
makeshift stage – although tonight's performance sounded merely like banal sing-along stuff. We walked
fairly randomly in the same area where we’d left off earlier; again, the Nyhavn
was buzzing but everywhere else was heavily winding (or already wound) down. We
passed a big group of student types with makeshift sailor hats and a big beer
supply, but that was mostly it. We wandered into a residential area and past a
store displaying things like pencil kits in the window, always a sure sign you’re
in Europe.

We got a
bit lost on the way back, trying streets in the right general
direction without seeming to get anywhere, and then one of them opened out onto
a huge, traffic-free octagonal square, bringing us almost face to face with a guard in a
fuzzy hat (I momentarily thought he was clicking his heels at me) – it was the
Amalienborg Slot, consisting of four royal buildings, another kind of sight you only stumble across in Europe. At this time of night though the
guards outnumbered the other people. From there we could figure out our way back. We had
dinner at the Restaurant Kogt, the kind of quiet tasteful place that could be in
any city, if you’re in a good city: a perfect place for our first night.
It wasn’t very busy, but an adjacent table held a group of four who got
increasingly louder as the night went on, in particular because of a visiting
Australian who talked about his achievements and his money in such detail that
he should have been easy to track down on Google (I couldn’t subsequently find him on there at all so it
was probably all lies and embellishment). The hotel was only a few minutes from there – the sing-along was over, and a group of
performers on a boat was putting on a show involving languid
choreography, plaintive music and a video projection conveying the sense of
being underwater. It finished soon after we started watching; we had another drink
in the hotel bar and called it a day. And I don’t mean just any old run of the
mill day.